THE RHINOCEROS OF THE LADO 409 
came out and camped by this rhino, to handle the skin and 
skeleton. In the middle of the night a leopard got caught 
in one of his small steel traps, which he had set out with a 
light drag. The beast made a terrific row and went off 
with the trap and drag. It was only caught by one toe; 
a hyena similarly caught would have wrenched itself 
loose; but the leopard, though a far braver and more dan¬ 
gerous beast, has less fortitude under pain than a hyena. 
Heller tracked it up in the morning, and shot it as, ham¬ 
pered by the trap and drag, it charged the porters. 
On the ashes of the fresh burn the footprints of the 
game showed almost as distinctly as on snow. One morn¬ 
ing we saw where a herd of elephant, cows and calves, 
had come down the night before to drink at a big bay of 
the Nile, three or four miles north of our camp. Numerous 
hippo tracks showed that during the darkness these beasts 
wandered freely a mile or two inland. They often wan¬ 
dered back of our camp at night. Always beside these night 
trails we found withered remnants of water cabbage and 
other aquatic plants which they had carried inland with 
them; I suppose accidentally on their backs. On several 
occasions where we could only make out scrapes on the 
ground the hippo trails puzzled us, being so far inland that 
we thought they might be those of rhinos; until we would 
come on some patch of ashes or of soft soil where we could 
trace the four toe marks. The rhino has but three toes, the 
one in the middle being very big; it belongs, with the 
tapir and horse, to the group of ungulates which tends to 
develop one digit of each foot at the expense of all the 
others; a group which in a long-past geological age was the 
predominant ungulate group of the world. The hippo. 
